Information Design for BOP

BOP Consulting is an independent research and strategy consultancy. Through a Knowledge Transfer Partnership (KTP) organised by the University of the Arts London, Max Ackermann was invited to consult BOP on how to improve their data-heavy reports.

Acting as Academic Supervisor, Max worked with Diego Ulrich to prepare a complete set of data visualisation guidelines and to create a report template for BOP.

Making data readable

During the first stage of the project, Max and Diego prepared a number of presentations for BOP staff on information design. Using plenty of real-world examples (see below for a selection), we demonstrated what a difference good design can make in communicating data.

Pushing Word and Excel to the limit

The best guidelines are worthless if they cannot be implemented, and BOP, like most businesses, use Microsoft Word and Excel to produce their documents. Through a great deal of research, testing and some programming, we managed to build an entire template workflow using only this standard software. It's hard to believe, but all charts below are made with Excel, using templates we designed and the dummy report (last 5 images below) was put together in Word.

Looking forward

The project was a great success and was showcased in the University of the Arts' KTP Review. If you work in research, or are a consultancy dealing with data and would like to increase the impact and accessibility of your reports or presenations, we would like to hear from you!